You're listening to an AirWave Media Podcast.

Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

Hello and welcome to episode 351 of Ben Franklin's World.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past

have shaped the present-day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Covart.

African Chattel Slavery, the predominant type of slavery practiced in colonial North America

in the early United States, didn't just represent one monolithic practice of slavery.

Practices of slavery varied by region, labor systems, legal codes, and empire.

Slavery also just wasn't about enslavers enslaving people for their labor.

And slavers used enslaved people to make statements about their social status,

as areas of economic investment that built generational wealth,

and as a form of currency.

Nicole Maskill, an associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina,

and the author of Bound by Bondage, Slavery in the creation of the Northern Gentry,

joins us to investigate the practice of slavery in Dutch New Netherlands,

and how the Colonies elite Dutch families built their wealth and power on the labor,

skills, and bodies of enslaved Africans and African Americans.

During our investigation, Nicole reveals details about the colony of New Netherlands

and its role within the Dutch Empire, the Dutch practice of slavery in New Netherlands,

and how New Netherlands elite families used enslaved people beyond their labor

to create and maintain generational wealth.

...